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Did life begin in a pool of acidic gloop?

JETS of sulphurous steam roar out of holes in the ground and an eggy stench hangs in the air. This is Bumpass Hell, a valley of bubbling mud pools in the heart of the Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. The valley is ringed with beautiful pine and fir trees climbing up the surrounding slopes, but life seems to have stayed away from the lower reaches. Billions of years ago, though, the opposite might have been true.

I’ve come to Bumpass Hell with David Deamer, a biochemist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, to watch him run an experiment recreating one of the most important episodes in the history of life&colon; when carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus came together in the primordial soup to form amino acids, DNA and the rest of life’s building blocks.

If Deamer is right, then the sort of extreme conditions found here were key to that momentous event. It may be an unattractive and rather dangerous place to work, but to Deamer this is one of the most precious places on Earth – the closest thing he can get to the cauldron of chemicals from which life might have emerged over 4 billion years ago.

Researchers have spent decades trying to recreate this magical moment in their labs, and they have made some impressive discoveries along the way. In 1953, Stanley Miller, then at the University of Chicago, was the first to synthesise amino acids by passing high voltages through a cocktail of ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water vapour. In the decades that followed, researchers found other ways to synthesise …